Month: July 2009

If the world is God’s novel, than Jesus is God writing himself into the story, as many clever human authors have done.

…though the autobiography “is” the author in a sense in which his other works are not, it can never be the whole of the author. It is still a formal expression and bound by the limitations of all material form, so that though it is a true revelation it is only a partial revelation: it incorporates only so much of the mind as matter is capable of containing. Its incompleteness is not due to any imperfection in the mind; it is simply and solely due to the necessary limitations of literary form.

Theologically, the Word is said to be “equal to the Father as touching His Godhead and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood”-which may be translated into the language of our analogy: “Equal to the Idea as touching its essence and inferior to the Idea as touching its expression.” It is inferior, not only in the sense that it is limited by form as the Idea is not, but also in the sense that its form is creaturely and therefore subject to the Idea-“I do the will of My Father.” This does not mean that the revelation is not perfect; it is, as the phrase goes, “perfect of its kind”; but the kind itself is capable only of so much and no more.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.6

Here, the analogy may break down again. When his disciples asked Jesus if they could see the Father, he said that if they have seen him, they HAD seen the father. So Jesus was everything right? That seems to go against what Sayers is saying here. But Jesus was of a certain type. In the incarnation, he laid aside his omnipresence, and other things as well. On the mount of transfiguration, something MORE was shown of him. So in a sense, Jesus is 100%, but there IS more to God than we see in Jesus, at least in expression.

For example, the Holy Spirit is an expression of God that is different than what we find in Jesus when he walked the earth. This doesn’t make Jesus any less God, but there is a sense that, within the bounds of time and space that the incarnation stepped into, there are limitations. Jesus, being 100% man as well, chose to operate within these limitations so we could know him better (and so he could take our place). But just like the author writing himself into the story, or the director of a film having a cameo, there is only so much of him that can be expressed.

It seems we can learn something about God by viewing him as like the author of a novel, and we are his characters in his created world. But as much as we are like God, we are not God and our character only has the capacity to be like is. It isn’t his. What this means is, be careful projecting human images (like that of a literary author) back onto God. You can come up with some bad theology.

Whatever we may think of the possibilities of direct divine intervention in the affairs of the universe, it is quite evident that the writer can-and often does – intervene at any moment in the development of his own story; he is absolute master, able to perform any miracle he likes.

I do not mean that he can invent undiscovered planets or people the world with monsters unknown to natural history-that kind of thing is a tale about marvels, not a tale abruptly modified by marvels. I mean simply that he can twist either character or plot from the course of its nature by an exertion of arbitrary power. He can slay inconvenient characters, effect abrupt conversions, or bring about accidents or convulsions of nature to rescue the characters from the consequences of their own conduct.

He can, in fact, behave exactly as, in our more egotistical and unenlightened petitions, we try to persuade God to behave. Whether we mock at miracles or demand miracles, this is the kind of miracle we usually mean. We mean that the judgment of natural law is to be abrogated by some power extraneous to the persons and circumstances.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.5

Today, my wife wrote an excellent piece concerning children’s literature and what sort of things we should or shouldn’t shield our children from. She makes the point that many Christian “sanitized” books and movies end up falling flat on both our emotions and intellects. That is to say, they suck.

Why? Sayer’s gets to the bottom of it here I think:

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most “edifying” or “propaganda” literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished. You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.4

I love a keen insight into God or the Bible that I had never seen before. Especially when it tears down assumptions and presumptions about God that we’ve picked up along the way without realizing it. Sometimes the Bible says a lot less about something than we think. And that’s significant. In fact, in the process of inferring lots of meaning from picking verses from all around, we may miss the one item that was clearly in the text to begin with.

That is the sort of ah-ha moment I had reading part of the main thesis to Sayer’s The Mind of the Maker. This is some of the real meat of the whole book.

The Jews, keenly alive to the perils of pictorial metaphor, forbade the representation of the Person of God in graven images. [The Muslims still do this]. Nevertheless, human nature and the nature of human language defeated them. No legislation could prevent the making of verbal pictures: God walks in the garden, He stretches out His arm, His voice shakes the cedars, His eyelids try the children of men. To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: “God is a spirit”, “without body, parts or passions”, He is pure being, “I AM THAT I AM”.

Man, very obviously, is not a being of this kind; his body, parts and passions are only too conspicuous in his make-up. How then can he be said to resemble God? Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? A case may be argued for all these elements in the complex nature of man. But had the author of Genesis anything particular in his mind when he wrote? It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, “God created”. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.2

How is exactly that we are made in the image of God? The answer usually has something to do with free will, desire for relationship (which includes a desire for language and expression), and such. And I think you can make good cases for all of those. However, I must confess I’ve missed the only thing explicitly mentioned in Genesis: that we must be like creators.

More on the importance of language. Metaphor is one of the foundations of language, in indeed, part of our special place as image bearers of the creator. Reading Owen Barfield and Rene Girard ths past year has driven home that point. When you try to “disentangle words”, as Sayers describes below, you are dehumanizing your discipline. It leads to death, not life.

This difficulty which confronts the scientists and has compelled their flight into formulae is the result of a failure to understand or accept the analogical nature of language. Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations; the attempt is bound to prove vain since it runs counter to the law of humanity.

Speaking of metaphor and meaing and science… Alright, so I’m a few years behind pop culture, have been listening to Coldplay lately.

I was just guessing, at numbers and figures
Pulling the puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Don’t speak as loud as my heart

-The Scientist

Good stuff.

Back to Sayers. To go on a bit further, she gives an example:

The confusion and difficulty are increased by the modern world’s preoccupation with the concept of progress. This concept–now rapidly becoming as precarious as those others quoted by Huizinga-imposes upon the human mind two (in the hypnotic sense) “suggestions”. The first is that any invention or creative act will necessarily tend to supersede an act of earlier date. This may be true of mechanical inventions and scientific formulae: we may say, for example, that the power-loom has superseded the hand-loom, or that Einsteinian physics has superseded Newtonian physics, and mean something by saying so. But there is no sense whatever in which we can say that Hamlet has “superseded” the Agamemnon, or that

“you who were with me in the ships at Mylae”

has superseded

en la sua voluntade a nostra pace

or

tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

The later in date leaves the earlier achievement unconquered and unchanged; that which was at the summit remains at the summit until the end of time.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.4

I mention this mostly to see if I’ve learned ANYTHING about classic literature in the past two years. I wasn’t immediately familiar with any of the phrases she quotes there at the end. Nonetheless, I was able to successfully place (without looking) the 2nd one as Dante and the 3rd one as Virgil. The first turned out to be T.S. Eliot (a contemporary). Oops. Two out of three ain’t bad, considering I would have gotten a zero two years ago.

You know, if you’ve followed my thoughts for any length of time, that I am convinced that is IS possible to be renaissance men of sorts in our service to the Lord. That is, one can be an good husband, father, writer, artist, musician, gardener, teacher, politician, church laymen, soldier, etc. all in the same lifetime. Those guys that are famous for making that scientific breakthrough or writing that great novel but burned through 3 marriages in the process and cursed God before they died… they took the low road.

Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world’s knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialised metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian, or the scientist the language of either. But the attempt must be made; and there are signs everywhere that the human mind is once more beginning to move. towards a synthesis of experience.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

I believe that theology is not just for theologians. Artists need to learn it too. So do plumbers. And computer nerds. And theologians and computer nerds are not exempt from learning a bit of plumbing.

As mentioned above, one of the keys to pulling this off is found in language. Using more and more specialized language cuts us off from each other and from we need to learn and do. Learn what those big esoteric words mean, but then don’t stay there. Bring it back toward the center when you can. It’s not dumbing down the meaning. It takes a clever mind to make the intricate plain.

A quote before the second chapter of The Mind of the Maker:

We have torn away the mental fancies to get at the reality beneath, only to find that the reality of that which is beneath is bound up with its potentiality of awakening these fancies. It is because the mind, the weaver of illusion, is also the only guarantor of reality that reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion.

-Sir Arthur Eddington: Nature of the Physical World.

Sayers echos later on:

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.

This is an interesting way to describe free will (or whatever it is that Man has):

No code is necessary to control the behaviour of matter, since matter is apparently not tempted to contradict its own nature, but obeys the law of its being in perfect freedom. Man, however, does continually suffer this temptation and frequently yields to it. This contradiction within his own nature is peculiar to man, and is called by the Church “sinfulness”; other psychologists have other names for it.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.1

In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers spends the first chapter differentiating between a “law” of nature, that cannot be defied (no matter how much you try or wish you could), and “law” of the arbitrary human pronouncement sort. Getting the two mixed up in dialogue is the source of all sorts of trouble.

The second condition [of a man-made law] is, of course, that the arbitrary law shall not run counter to the law of nature. If it does, it not only will not, it cannot be enforced. Thus, if the [Cricket authority] were to agree, in a thoughtless moment, that the ball must be so hit by the batsman that it should never come down to earth again, cricket would become an impossibility. A vivid sense of reality usually restrains sports committees from promulgating laws of this kind; other legislators occasionally lack this salutary realism.

When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.1

Laws regulating human society that go against the laws of nature… “Cap and Trade” anyone?

If I ever write a story, it will be about immortality. I love the phrase he uses here: The fugitive spirit.

…lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness. But our stories cannot be expected always to rise above our common level. They often do. Few lessons are taught more clearly in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the “fugitive” would fly. For the fairy-story is specially apt to teach such things, of old and still today.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, (Recovery, Escape, Consolation)